The A to Z of Alfie Zeller

By Nick Galtress

Dip into The A to Z of Alfie Zeller to find: Petty Officer Sam Zeller, who swam the Channel long before Captain Webb, in a straight line, without body grease in search of escargots; Pierre, who invented Chicken Marengo and was promoted to corporal by Napoleon; Alicia Zeller, who ran the séances at which Arthur Conan Doyle saw fairies. Meet Trooper Zeller, who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade, or would have done, if he’d been there; Zeb Zeller, whose diaries made those of Sam Pepys read like the tedious account of bowel movements which they mostly are; Herman Zeller, who put Franz Kafka on to surrealism; the Zeller who was defenestrated in Prague and fell into a rose bush; and finally meet the Zeller who, although a staunch Royalist, fought in the Parliamentary ranks at Naseby.
It is all explained somewhere and Alfie does not spare the details. If short of a few, he admits to perhaps having made them up. What, he argues, is a slightly dubious fact, if it gets in the way of the truth?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398448582

Nick Galtress

The author, determinedly Yorkshire by birth and inclination is now at the back-end of his life. The front-end was largely spent in marrying, siring children, watching them eat away his slender resources, following a very devious career path, (more of a careering path really) and earning a good deal of his living with his pen. After years of writing what others wanted him to write for money, he now writes for himself and, probably, little or no money. If he has found ‘a voice’, it is a very satirical one. The list of people, things and philosophies that he dislikes is long and growing. He hopes to get around to ‘having a go’ at all of them. This is salvo number two. The opening salvo was the irreverent comedy, Death’s Door. Second on the Left Down the Corridor.

Book preview

About the Author

The author, determinedly Yorkshire by birth and inclination is now at the back-end of his life. The front-end was largely spent in marrying, siring children, watching them eat away his slender resources, following a very devious career path, (more of a careering path really) and earning a good deal of his living with his pen. After years of writing what others wanted him to write for money, he now writes for himself and, probably, little or no money. If he has found ‘a voice’, it is a very satirical one. The list of people, things and philosophies that he dislikes is long and growing. He hopes to get around to ‘having a go’ at all of them. This is salvo number two. The opening salvo was the irreverent comedy, Death’s Door. Second on the Left Down the Corridor.

Dedication

For Jane.

Copyright Information©

Nick Galtress 2022

The right of Nick Galtress to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398448575 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398448582 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

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Preface

There are several things which have prompted the writing of this account; The first and, no doubt, the most important, is boredom. Vanity comes a close second and Family History a distant third.

Why is it composed alphabetically? The answer is quite straightforward.

If you are trying to put some form of order into a disjointed amalgam of half remembered events of marked insignificance and give them any degree of coherence, you need a mechanism. Or so the English Master at school told us although, I have since discovered that a lot of what he told us was drivel.

My mechanism is to list things alphabetically using the standard English alphabet and to begin, as it does, with the letter ‘A’.

When I get to letter ‘Z’, I shall stop.

There may be some letters which appear to have been left out. That is because nothing of moment comes to mind which begins with that letter. I could, I suppose, invent some happenings but invention is not a natural part of my make-up.

To aid the reader, if any such there is, I append a biographical note about the Zeller’s to whom Alfie belongs.

Or I would if I had one.

Simon Bolivar once said, ‘History is only as accurate as the person who writes it.’ Or was that, Simone de Beauvoir? I get those two mixed up.

There have been Zellers in England since early in the Sixteenth Century. The first to arrive was Friedrich ‘Pinkie’ Zeller.

Friedrich was a mercenary who fought for his supper and was, apparently, pretty good at it. In 1520 at The Field of the Cloth of Gold he out-tilted King Henry the Eighth so badly that the king got cross. He ordered him to return with him to London and pass on his skills to the assembled knights. You didn’t refuse King Henry. At least, not with your head on.

Friedrich got the nickname ‘Pinkie’ in 1547 at the last pitched battle against the Scots which was fought at Pinkie Cleugh and where he lost a leg.

Invalided out of military duties he spent the rest of his days teaching German to the king’s current Spy Master. That was the beginning of my family’s time in England, years before, it should be noted, the arrival of all those German George’s. We are, of course, only one branch of an extended family. There remain a lot of other Zellers who did not emigrate. Those who stayed at home, stayed German and stayed patriotic.

For instance. The Claus Zeller, valet to Count Bismark who polished his pickelhaube each day before breakfast and Otto. P. Zeller who designed the rear fins on Hitler’s V2 Rockets.

That is, however, another story.

Along with the fact that we Zellers are German in origin and have long tried to conceal it, the following may be of some slight interest. We have an ornate family crest and hide quite a few notables amongst our number. We are quite proud of Carl the composer even if his operas were Light. We enjoy sharing our name with Walter the motorcyclist though he was always getting beaten by John Surtees. There is also Tyler Zeller and his equally oddly named siblings who dunk basketballs for a living. Well, somebody has to I suppose.

The French side, with its highfalutin politicians and high-ranking military men, we gloss over on the grounds that that is what we Brits do with the French. Why we do that has never been totally clear to me. Maybe Napoleon Bonaparte has got something to do with it, but I suspect that it is deeper rooted than that and has something to do with garlic.

After some four hundred years of not saying ‘Ja’ and ‘Nein’ and not eating Knackwurst, we Zellers hold jealously onto our Britishness. As my father said, repeatedly, ‘What can be more British than being a Stockbroker and standing for the Hallelulah Chorus in The Messiah.’

But Handel was German, Dad.

So were all the Hanoverian Georges, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert to mention only some but we don’t speak of that

If you want to grow up open-minded, don’t have immigrant roots.

So, now that I have stirred the pot of my memory and remembered great swathes of Zeller history, the alphabetical account will tell it all, warts, and all. If I can remember the facially disfiguring bits. Or any bits of it, come to that.

A selective memory is a very useful tool as politicians and other born liars are wont to say. So Up and Sideways into the highly selective recollections.

A

Antecedents. (See also F. Forebears.)

Hans Zeller (1672 – 1729)

Hans is one of my favourites. He was a pirate. A very bold, rapacious, and successful Pirate until a British cannon ball ended his plunderous run of luck at the age of Forty-Seven.

Quite how he became a Pirate is difficult to explain. Born in Leipzig, which is about as far away from the sea as one can get in Germany, he had no obvious background for it.

His father was a merchant, his mother a farmers’ daughter, and his older brother a priest. When he was seventeen, Hans upped sticks, pocketed a great dollop of the family riches, went to Bremerhaven, and bought a boat. He also bought a crew, mostly from the local prison, went out into The North Sea and wrought havoc. His reputation soared along with the stories of his brutality.

His preferred pastime was, apparently, a game which became known as ‘Hansing’. This consisted of almost emptying a barrel of rum but leaving just enough in the bottom to set fire to. When it was burning nicely, the victim of the day was invited to ‘take a little drink with The Captain’.

Whilst the crew plugged their ears with bits of tarred rope, he was then shoved into the flames head first and, screaming loudly, left to roast.

Hans had other tricks which, even by the standards of the day, were felt to be excessive.

He had severed ears in his cabin through which he strained his wine into a decanter and the top of a human skull to drink it from.

He sired a vast brood of bastards to all of whom I am presumably related, along with a loyal wife whom he had picked up somewhere along the line. Their progeny is amongst my official ancestors.

He must also have acquired, somehow, a measure of good seamanship. He ruled the waves for many years and evaded all efforts to stop him. Finally, as said, at the age of Forty-Seven, his days were ended by a British cannonball which unkindly caught him on the head whilst he was in The Heads getting rid of his supper.

The family kept the cannonball and handed it down through the generations.

My grandfather always had it on display in a glass case on his desk. It was destroyed by The Luftwaffe in 1941 during The Blitz on London.

I always felt that there was a certain irony in that, given Hans’ Leipsig background.

Rufus Zeller. (1790–1864)

Rufus Zeller was a doctor. A Doctor of Medicine, a science which was even more inexact in his day than it is in ours. He specialised, if that is not too precise a word, in the urinary system and infections relating to it. Although he would not have admitted it, a great deal of his considerable fortune came from treating venereal disease in members of the British Aristocracy. He was sometimes successful. On other occasions, the syphilis won, and madness ensued. In the Upper Classes of the day, however, it was not always easy to distinguish between a pox-based lunacy and a congenital one.

Rufus was to become famous for an entirely different reason.

It was he who suggested that the apparent madness of George the Third was, in fact, caused by Porphyria, a disease which fell neatly into his area of expertise.

Told to keep quiet about it by The Prince Regent who was enjoying a right royal time of it and didn’t want his dad cured, he disobeyed. George The Third was restored to health, took over the reins again and ruled incompetently until his death in 1820 when his son regained control.

One of George the Fourth’s first acts as sovereign was to banish Rufus to the colonies. Or what remained of them since he had lost America. Rufus spent the next Forty odd years in Jamaica enjoying the sunshine, eating dried fish, and examining urinary tracts. Not always, it should be said, in the case of his female patients, for entirely medical reasons.

I have every reason to believe that he too sired more than a few bastards.

(See under B. ‘Bastards’.)

George. R. Zeller (1875-1933)

Named George Rex in honour of the ruling monarch, our George was a Writer. Not it must be said, a widely read or wildly successful one. His work, if that’s what it was, was mostly concerned with what he called ‘The Art of Living’. A title which, after his death was borrowed by André Maurois apparently without acknowledgement. The family thought about suing him but didn’t know the French word for it.

What he meant by that title or what aspects of Life he intended to shed light on, cannot be determined by reading his published output. Very little can be determined in George’s writings.

The books appeared one after another, sold a few copies and were then ‘remaindered’. The only one which brought him anything by way of recognition was quaintly titled, ‘How to Succeed at Nothing but Gain Materially’.

To this day, I have no idea what thought, if any, that title is trying to express but it was bought

in what, for him, were quite large numbers. Presumably by the many untalented people who were attracted by the promise of plenty. It is long out-of-print, and the family seems to be short on copies so there is no way of re-visiting it.

Not that I would be doing that as I haven’t read it in the first place.

My Grandfather had a copy along with another of his volumes called, ‘Death is but a stepping stone’. To where, George does not say and that work too was locked away, for some bizarre reason, in the drawer where Grandpapa kept his pornography. Or so it was discovered when he died, and my mortified Grandmother had a bonfire.

George Rex Zeller was, however, something of a notoriety in his day. Somewhat older than most of the cannon fodder, he went to Flanders, sheltered in a trench, got shellshock, was invalided home and met Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

The former of whom must, with a name like that, presumably have shared some of his German ancestry?

Living, somewhat, off that encounter he went on a lecture tour of Great Britain calling it ‘Happier Horizons for Hapless Humanity’. Whether or not he managed to brighten anyone’s life, is doubtful but he earned a lot of money.

So much money, in fact, that he created a Foundation; ‘Homes for the Hapless’ he called it, but I think that it is long since gone. The King did eventually recognise his efforts and the sycophancy of his name. He gave him a medal and tea on the Palace Lawn.

Activism.

Mildred; P. Zeller (1895-1920)

Mildred was the sister of my Great Grand Aunt Sophia and a Suffragette.

A doubty lass who broke windows in Oxford Street, broke wind from being force-fed in prison and broke barriers by stripping naked outside The Houses of Parliament.

The family never quite knew how to treat its militant member. Most of them regarded her as thoroughly off-centre and dangerous to know. Others had a secret sympathy but always kept it that way, a secret.

She lived to see a measure of franchise gained but was never old enough to vote. She died before reaching the, then, required, age of Thirty. Mrs Pankhurst read a eulogy at her funeral and her coffin was decorated with the Badge of The Women’s Social and Political Union.

Odd because she had never belonged to it. It is rumoured that she associated it with Lesbianism. Although why that should have worried her is difficult to explain. She lived for most of her short adult years in close proximity to a Lancashire Lass with a moustache.

The Zellers do not tend to talk a lot about Mildred.

Aeronautics.

Padraig Zeller (1880 to 1918)

It was a Zeller who first flew across the Atlantic.

The feat is credited to Alcock and Brown but quite erroneously. Padraig Zeller took off from a field just outside Dublin and crash landed in the sea within spitting distance of Snow Hill, Delaware. He was killed on impact and his body eaten by sea creatures but his co-pilot, Sean O’Sullivan, waded ashore and told the story.

The fact that no one believed a word of it and the wreckage was never found, led to what is